Sunday, October 19, 2008

This was supposed to be posted earlier this afternoon but I watched 5 minutes of the New Orleans/Carolina game and almost fell into a coma. Damn, the NFL can be boring as hell. I was nice and refreshed by my nap though and had the energy to write up a huge pack of Score cards for A Pack A Day. I'm going to say it right now, I like Score. I've always liked Score. Even when they were pretty boring, I still liked them. I regret terribly that there isn't a Score Baseball set to collect right now. Score was always that safe, simple set I could fall back on when everything else in the card business got insane. This is the same for Score Football. I haven't collected much football this year, but I've bought several jumbos of Score. For the price of your average Upper Deck hobby pack you get a huge wad of cards, including several rookies and inserts. Gotta love that. I'm talking about Jumbo rack packs though... regular 7 card dollar packs are pretty boring. 30 card Jumbo packs are good, but they still don't beat the huge 52 card Rack packs. Let me open one and you shall see for yourself:

There was also a Bears rookie in this pack, but I gave it away in my football contest and I don't remember what it was anymore. So basically two rookies per half unless you get a glossy parallel or something. This means the rookies are slightly short printed, but still very gettable. The base cards are a delightful mess. the borders are weirdly angular and have a slightly marbleized look using team colors. There's also a team and brand logo, the player and team name on the bottom and ROOKIE on the sides if applicable. The photos are uniformly action shots showing the player from their head to their waist. Not bad looking at all. The backs mirror the front with a bio, personal info and stats that unfortunately max out at 5 years. The cards are a little busy but don't look all that bad. Both halves of the pack also have a few insert cards in them. this half had a Gold numbered parallel of Patrick Willis that looks pretty nice, a Calvin Johnson Young Stars card that looks almost like it's a drawing, and a tattoo of the Raiders. Three tattoos actually, there's a tattoo of the team name, the shield logo and a helmet all on the small sized card. If my child showed up in front of me wearing Raiders tattoos, I'd seriously consider where I went wrong as a parent, but the concept of tattoos themselves looks like a fun idea.

Anyone following this blog or my own blog closely knows I have had a bit of an existential freakout over my favorite team, (or former ex-favorite team) the Falcons this season. This pack was a bit of a shock to my system. First of all was pulling the Joey Harrington card. Just hearing the words Joey and Harrington in the same sentence makes me a little queasy. Lions fans know of what I speak. So pulling that card was unpleasant. Then I got the Michael Turner card though. I had completely forgotten that we had traded for him, and I was a bit stunned seeing him in his Falcons minicamp uni. That kind of perked me up a bit until I saw with horror Warrick Dunn in a Tampa uniform. Yeah, I've seen piles of cards with Warrick in a Bucs uni, but I loved Warrick as a Falcon (and hate the Buccaneers) so it still threw me for a loop. finally I got the Matt Ryan sticker card and my emotional rollercoaster went off the rails. I can't stand Matt Ryan, or rather, I can't stand the pick of Matt Ryan, but it is completely impossible for me to hate a sticker card of any kind. I think when it is all said and done and I finally wuss out and embrace my Falcons once again, this sticker will be the turning point. I mean, if Matt Ryan is good enough to be on a sticker, than he can't be that bad. But not yet. I may have watched the last half of the game last week, but they are on a bye this week so I can hate them one more weekend before I go crawling back.

Two more rookies in this pack, Sedrick Ellis and Falcons receiver that I never heard of before Harry Douglas. Harry had a big catch last week, so I guess he's good. There were two glossy cards in here, too bad glossy cards are useless. They look exactly like base cards, but don't have the pleasing matte finish. The glossies are kind of slippery to be honest. Also there are glossy parallels of insert cards too which is kind of daft. Who is going to collect a parallel of an insert? I don't remember anything like that since the Gold Medallion days of Fleer Ultra. The Franchise and Hot Rookies inserts are both suitably gaudy. They also have that feel of a drawing like the Calvin Johnson card. These have to be photos, the helmets and shadows look too real, but Donruss did something to the images to make them really look like sketches. I really like it as it reminds me of the olden days of Diamond Kinds and artsy checklists from Upper Deck. The pull of the pack has to be the Ryan though. I mean, COME ON. It's a sticker! That right there was worth it. This is fun stuff for five bucks, a hell of a lot more fun than a lot of blasters I've opened recently.

8 comments:

Score is a guilty pleasure of mine. It's so basic and boring it's cool. Maybe it just reminds me of a time when there was no game-used, auto, hair cards. Just buy a couple of cheap packs and you're assured to get a card of every rookie that year. It's a good set to get kids started collecting.

Nice selection of Ducks. Sorry about Joey, though. The Lions ruined him, I swear. They still put stickers in packs? That's great. I'd still be really confused to get something that said Donruss on it out of a Score pack.

Every time I stop into Tar-zhay or Wal-Mart I stand and look through all the blasters and wax packs two or three times, but almost never buy any, even when they're fully stocked. Yesterday I finally did buy two packs, and they were the Score football jumbos. It's nice to finally find a new set with a unique design that isn't totally about rookies, that has some nice inserts and is obtainable without dealing with scarce shortprints. This will be the football set I collect this year. Ten bucks for 100+ cards beats any of the blasters for any sport.